Christmas goodies

I haven't been blogging lately. I also haven't been baking as much this month. We went to Florida this month, but we also hosted Christmas for the first time ourselves. So I did a lot of cooking and baking this last week, anyway. For Christmas dinner, I made Betty Crocker crescent rolls and cloverleafs, sugar cookies, KAF's chocolate-pecan pie, KAF's cinnamon twists (and boysenberry twists), and America's Test Kitchen's peanut butter blossoms and mint chocolate cookies. I would have documented the pie and some of the other treats, but pre-Christmas drama overwhelmed me. And since KAF does a good job of detailing the pie, and the twists and crescents I've made before, I will show you how I made the cookies from America's Test Kitchen's holiday cookie issue.

Peanut Butter Blossoms

The first part was to prepare the dry ingredients. This recipe called for mixing some of the AP flour with peanuts in a food processor (or my blender) and creating what seemed to be a peanut flour. I probably could have used my bag of Trader Joe's peanut flour instead, oh well.

 Once that was processed it was whisked with the other dry ingredients.

I creamed the butter and sugar, then added peanut butter. The recipe calls for 1/2 cup of peanut butter, though I accidentally grabbed my 2/3 cup and so these cookies were super-extra peanut-buttery! I added the egg and vanilla (homemade of course!) and then added the dry ingredients. The dough was refrigerated for about 45 minutes.

Once it was ready, I rolled 1 inch balls of dough in Christmas colored sugar and baked them for about 10 minutes. I decided that half would be regular peanut butter cookies because some in my family aren't huge chocolate fans. Once the cookies came out, I plopped on a Hershey's kiss. ATK recommended putting the kiss on 2 minutes before the cookies were done, and placing them back in the oven to finish, I found that to be an unnecessary step and skipped it.

Marvelous Chocolate Mint Cookies

These cookies were really good. I love Andes mints and the cookies are almost brownie like.

After mixing together the dry ingredients, I mixed the chocolate mixture over the stove. Butter and brown sugar were melted together over the stove, then the chocolate was added. 

 The recipe called for 6 oz of bittersweet chocolate only, but I only had 2 oz of it. I had 2 oz of dark chocolate chips and used another two oz of semi sweet chocolate.

 Once that mixture was melted and cooled, it was time for the dough to come together. The chocolate mixture was mixed with an egg and the dry mixture, then refrigerated for 30 minutes.

The cookies, like the pb blossoms, were rolled into balls and baked for about ten minutes. When they came out of the oven, I carefully placed an Andes mint on top of each cookie, letting the warm cookie melt the mint. Once melted, I lightly spread out the melted chocolate and mint around the cookie. Yum and yum.

Everything came out well, and of course, I made way too much and am still eating some of these cookies!